The Trouble With Welfare Reform

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/opinion/the-trouble-with-welfare-reform.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Welfare Is Still Broken,” by John Kasich (Op-Ed, Aug. 22):

It’s refreshing to hear one of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates view impoverished people with respect rather than as slackers looking for free stuff, and urge more assistance with education or training than the law allows. But Governor Kasich gets the main problem with the 1996 welfare reform almost exactly backward.

The 1996 welfare reform did not give states too little flexibility. Rather, it gave them too much. The law abolished guarantees of cash assistance to all eligible poor families. It gave states a fixed pool of money for income support and work programs along with considerable leeway about how — or even whether — to spend it.

Some states adopted the most generous provisions allowed, but many others took the opportunity to become much more restrictive.

Last year, Missouri’s Legislature voted to cut thousands of families from the state’s cash assistance program and redirected a significant proportion of welfare funds to pro-marriage and anti-abortion programs. Georgia gave fliers to welfare applicants saying “we believe welfare is not the best option for your family,” and applicants were rejected for things like failing to file 24 or more job applications a week.

Washington has too little control over most states’ use of welfare money, not too much.

STEPHANIE COONTZ

Olympia, Wash.

The writer is director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families.

To the Editor:

I was glad to read that Gov. John Kasich has acknowledged the need to improve the welfare system. But he did not mention the single most important aspect of any effort to help the indigent and unemployed find work and move toward self-sufficiency: child care.

Unless full-scale free child care is built into the program, most parents will find it impossible to achieve the goal of finding jobs and keeping them.

SUSAN SHIELDS

Santa Barbara, Calif.

To the Editor:

Gov. John Kasich states: “These reforms, for the first time, introduced personal accountability into the welfare equation.” What those reforms of 1996 left out, however, was the government’s accountability. That is why welfare remains a broken system.

The Republican-controlled Congress was all for requiring poor single mothers to work. But it ducked when it came to guaranteeing full-time employment for these welfare moms (and occasionally dads).

That guarantee was part of President Jimmy Carter’s Program for Better Jobs and Income, which my colleagues and I helped design at the Department of Labor in the 1970s. In 1996, the guarantee was also part of Bill Clinton’s original reform proposal.

Perhaps next year, another President Clinton can finally fix welfare by ensuring that at least one member of every family with children has a job that, with the earned-income tax credit, keeps the family out of poverty. That would redeem society’s obligation to the poor, reciprocating for recipients’ willingness to work.

ARNOLD PACKER

San Diego

The writer was an assistant secretary of labor for policy during the Carter administration.